Healthy Options at P.F. Chang’s, Part 1: Appetizers

P.F. Chang’s China Bistro has become a popular “chain of full service upscale casual dining restaurants that feature a blend of high-quality, traditional Chinese cuisine and attentive service, in a high-energy contemporary bistro setting,” growing to 197 locations since they opened in 1993.

It’s definitely possible to make some healthy & delicious choices, though you”ll need to be very careful with portion sizes and sodium.

Oh, and yes, that fortune cookie pictured above is meant to be ironic.

The nutrition info below is for ONE SERVING of each item. I’ll let you know if an order contains more than one serving, which is often the case.

Starters/Small Plates – Better Choices

IMPORTANT: The appetizers are meant to be shared, and the nutrition information they give takes that into account — most of the small plates should be split up into 2, 4, or even 8 servings. So if you get one of these for yourself (or split one between two people instead of four), make sure you do the math and know exactly how much you’re eating!

The best appetizer choices are the steamed dumplings — as long as you skip the sauce. The “Potsticker Sauce” (with the vegetable and pork dumplings) has 610mg of sodium in that 2-ounce cup, and the “Dumpling Sauce” (with the shrimp) has an outrageous 1,250mg.

Getting the dumplings fried instead adds about 2g of fat and 15 calories to each dumpling.

Crispy Wontons – 8 servings per dish 45 cal, no sat fat, 3g total fat, 60mg sodium, 4g carbs, no fiber, 2g proteinYeah, these are just bits of deep-fried dough. Are you really only going to eat just 1/8th of that plate?

Soups – Better Choices

The soup will add a ton of sodium to your meal, but some are better than others. Like the appetizers, the bowls of soup are meant to be shared five ways.

Egg Drop Soup You can get this in a cup (single serving) or a five-serving bowl. Either way, each serving contains: 60 cal, no sat fat, 3g total fat, 640mg sodium, 8g carbs, no fiber, 1g protein

Soups – Worst Choice

Hot and Sour Soup You can get this in a cup (single serving) or a five-serving bowl. Either way, each serving contains: 80 cal, 1g sat fat, 3g total fat, 1,000mg sodium (!), 9g carbs, no fiber, 5g protein

Salads – Better Choice

Making a good choice here means you’d get the Asian Shrimp Salad and skip the dressing.

Menu Mondays are my recommendations for the most healthful options at chain restaurants. Although it may be tough to find “perfect” options when eating out, it’s important to choose “better” whenever possible, and I hope these guides will help make that easier for you.

indicates the “best-of-the-best,” and indicates the “worst-of-the-worst,” more or less.

Ummm….so what you are saying is that the carbs listed on the PF Chang’s Nutrition Data for STEAMED DUMPLINGS (or anything else for that matter) is the listing for the WHOLE DISH, not just a serving? I find their data sheet a little confusing because it goes Servings per Dish, Calories per dish, but then the remaining columns do not specify.

The nutrition numbers I listed in this post were for one serving, so one order of the Steamed Dumplings appetizer has six servings, each with 45 calories.

It looks like PF Chang’s has changed the way they list their nutrition information in their PDF since I wrote this post, but the numbers seem pretty similar. Doing a little spot-checking, it looks like the info they list is per dish for all the nutrients, not just calories. So really, you can just ignore the “number of servings” column, and then just divide by the number of people with whom you’ve shared the dish. 🙂